Supah_Schmendrick

Supah_Schmendrick 54m ago

But wait, you said that "only genuine psychopaths" would question these ideas. Are you claiming that just about everyone was psychopathic back then?

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Supah_Schmendrick 57m ago

I think you've assumed that I think that critical theory is the only type of academic history?

I don't know what you think; I gave a proposed definition for how to determine whether academic history is "woke" or not.

It's part of this "overcorrection" that I see that whenever a historical figure is pointed out as being not worthy of our praise, it must be "woke".

The "overcorrection" isn't happening in the academy; it's happening in public, who as I'm sure you know by and large don't really do actual history. Instead, pop history is a sort of secular cultural catechesis and mythopoetics; pulling together a narrative for the in-group to anchor its sense of identity to, and affirming the moral worth of that narrative.

I find actual "good" history to be incredibly boring. It's basically translating and regurgitating primary texts

The really good ones manage to piece together narratives from those primary documents. Like, no-one ever accused Ferdinand Braudel of being compulsively readible, but he manages to take all the grain prices and trader's manifests and censuses of windmills and meld all of it into fascinating insights into every day life in historical Europe. Biography can be similar, getting you in the subject's head and humanizing them across the centuries and gulfs of cultural differences.

(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)

Agreed, but it needs to be a catholic too.

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Supah_Schmendrick 1hr ago

For example, all else being equal, it is more moral to not torture people for fun than it is to torture people for fun. This was as true 2000 years ago as it is now.

Would an aztec have agreed? Would a mongol? An Iroquois? Any random european who went to a public breaking on the wheel?

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Supah_Schmendrick 7hr ago

I've noticed a tendency in pop history to equate "doing something notable" with "being someone good", whereas within academic history, historians are much better about maintaining an objective distance from the figure being studied. I think it's pretty telling that this objective distancing is often labeled "wokeness", but that's a digression.

The difference is, "woke" history is "whig" history - trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not). Actual good history doesn't sugarcoat the past; it immerses you in it so you can understand the actual norms and mores of the time and thus figure out for yourself who was being a giant piece of shit given the society they were in.

It's like trying to have a conversation across a language barrier. Woke history assumes that the phonemes " /ˈnɪɡə(ɹ)/" are always and forever a fighting-words-tier slur, because they are in standard contemporary American english...but doesn't bother to figure out whether or not the person they're talking to in fact speaking chinese or korean.

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Supah_Schmendrick 7hr ago

The old-time political history that is common knowledge is like the old-time architecture that's still around; it's survived a hidden but powerful selection pressure for the stuff people want to look at and keep around, plus a loss of contextual knowledge about what was deemed quality at the time and what was common or rejected. All the old dross gets torn down and forgotten, and what's left gets a positive sheen on it because it's so different in appearance from the commonplace habits and styles of the present day.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

Supah_Schmendrick 7d ago

The Fuhrerprinzip is a right-wing idea, after all.

Yeah, but there are plenty of left-wing ideas that rhyme. Lenin's "vanguard party" establishing a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a contemporary example, with Lenin, Stalin, and Mao's cults of personality rivalling or surpassing Hitler's own.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

Supah_Schmendrick 9d ago

They've been shouting "death to Israel" for a while too; elite colleges being anti-zionist and "anti-colonial" isn't some new development.

Moreover, the anti-white attitudes haven't recently coalesced into the types of encampments, campus takeovers, and outright militancy that the recent Gaza demonstrations have. Do you really think that the folks in the Trump administration would have refused to go after Columbia if it had "just" been anti-white or anti-Christian encampments and campus takeovers? They're pulling funding from schools for permitting single transgender athletes to compete outside their biological sex; I'm pretty sure they'd jump at the chance to take any plausible reason to strike at the universities.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

Supah_Schmendrick 10d ago

The overt, propaganda use of a text can be significantly distinct from its artistic merits (eg: Triumph of the Will, which is both noisome NSDAP propaganda and beautifully shot)

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Supah_Schmendrick 13d ago

We're working on this!

(and this baseball fan finds T-20 cricket immense fun)

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Supah_Schmendrick 13d ago

The climate is terrible, and pollution and crime are rampant there. The Central Valley - especially the southern bits - is a miserable place.

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Supah_Schmendrick 13d ago

young non hispanic white men are no longer even a majority of young men if you look at gen alpha.

They're still a massive plurality, and might be a majority depending on how the "hispanic"-identification shakes out (if you're the product of a mixed family, are roughly the same color as Taylor Lautner and have the surname "Lopez" are you hispanic or white? It's not immediately obvious absent cultural signifiers which are malleable to self-ID and incentive).

Also, pointing to black women isn't the flex you think it is, because they wield massive political power in the Democratic party, which very much has a puncher's chance of winning any given elections despite being a dysfunctional krazy-glue ethnic spoils coalition. Even gen alpha white men are a much larger and higher-earning-potential demographic.

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Supah_Schmendrick 13d ago

Except for the fact that white young men are now by far the strongest GOP demographic.

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Supah_Schmendrick 14d ago

why the distinction?

Madison in Federalist No. 45 wrote that "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite."

The Tenth Amendment explicitly states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Of course, all this assumes that people will be most involved in their localities and states, with only sporadic contact with national-level politics. That theory didn't really survive contact with modern communication and transportation technologies.

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Supah_Schmendrick 14d ago

All you have to do is to make it effectively impossible to get a bank account, phone number, get paid and other necessities without having an ID number and then freeze those functions for people who have are illegally in the country and they'll end up largely deporting themselves.

You're vastly underestimating the scale of Social Security Number (the closest the U.S. has to a "national ID number") fraud and the difficulties of enforcing it.

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Supah_Schmendrick 16d ago

Yes, this has been a traditionalist/progressive vs. liberals tension for a long, long time. Traditionalists argue that good behavior and virtue (i.e. cultural aesthetics) are terminal values, liberals argue the only terminal value are results, and the world turns.

Interestingly, if you look at other domains, the sides reverse. Liberals/Progressives attack the Trump administration on the grounds that they are not displaying the proper "good behavior and virtue" (i.e. "subverting our democracy," "norms", "rule of law", etc.) where Trumpist-rightists are arguing that, e.g. in the recent immigration kerfuffles, "the only terminal value [is] results" such that any district court which purports to order Tren de Aragua gangmembers brought back into the country after their deportation flight had already left US airspace cannot be legitimate on a fundamental level.

Even on family-planning issues, there's a similar dynamic between a progressive left that views upholding an ideal of women's role in society as the primary goal (virtue primacy), whereas the natalist right points at crashing TFR and marriage rates (material primacy).

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Supah_Schmendrick 17d ago

Anyway, sliding all the way down the slope, unless Trump is flying the plane, deportations until the executive branch are illegal

Under normal circumstances, I would expect this statute to cover it:

Title 3 USC §301. General authorization to delegate functions; publication of delegations. The President of the United States is authorized to designate and empower the head of any department or agency in the executive branch, or any official thereof who is required to be appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to perform without approval, ratification, or other action by the President (1) any function which is vested in the President by law, or (2) any function which such officer is required or authorized by law to perform only with or subject to the approval, ratification, or other action of the President: Provided, That nothing contained herein shall relieve the President of his responsibility in office for the acts of any such head or other official designated by him to perform such functions. Such designation and authorization shall be in writing, shall be published in the Federal Register, shall be subject to such terms, conditions, and limitations as the President may deem advisable, and shall be revocable at any time by the President in whole or in part.

However if the President isn't compos mentis, there's a question whether he's able to functionally delegate those powers unless he had something previously set up, either via another statutory scheme which explicitly authorizes the devolution of powers to another executive officer, or via regulation and/or EO. And obviously here there's the factual question of whether the "senior staffer" who allegedly hijacked Biden's autopen" fills the relevant criteria of 301.

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Supah_Schmendrick 22d ago

The US could sort out the corruption and drugs,

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh citation very much needed.

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Supah_Schmendrick 22d ago

Setting aside Benjamin's socialism, it seems to me that the important aspect of this definition is the dislocation of politics from materiality, and its fusion with aesthetics.

What is Trump's focus on curtailing immigration if not extremely material?

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Supah_Schmendrick 24d ago · Edited 24d ago

There's pro-Palestinian protests and there's pro-Palestinian protests. I don't think there's much sympathy for the latter, however there would rightly be a huge outcry over targeting the former.

EDIT - the one guy named in the article you linked seems to have...uh...some spicy takes about October 7 and the proper solution to the Israel/Palestine question. Those takes in and of themselves are obviously not grounds for deportation (although given what he teaches - "a first-year Africana Studies writing seminar called 'What is Blackness? Race and Processes of Racialization'" - I can't imagine we'd be losing that much of real merit - or anything that you in particular would particularly like having in our country).

However, one of the protests he was involved with allegedly involved a mob forcing their way inside a hotel where a career fair including Boeing and L3Harris was being held (those companies make weapons which Israel uses, which apparently makes them persona non grata), and making the event impossible to continue through the use of "bullhorns, cymbals, pots, and pans" and chanting. He also appears to have been a ringleader in Cornell's SJP encampment. Regardless of the cause, it's reasonable for a college to suspend someone over that kind of disruptive behavior which is sufficient to cause loss of an F-1 visa, apparently. The guy knew the terms of his immigration status, and still thought that playing radical was more important. FAFO.

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Supah_Schmendrick 24d ago

his behavior in the Zelensky meeting and in general on social media have been the opposite at least in my perception, it seems to maximize for heat vs light in the real world.

The problem was that Zelensky was using that meeting for heat as well, grandstanding to the press and dragging the subject away from the actual purpose of the meeting, which was signing the minerals deal that his own government suggested as a backdoor tripwire security guarantee. Zelensky has a habit of double-dipping like this; Biden also allegedly yelled at Zelensky for being an ingrate, just like Trump and Vance, when, on a call to discuss an aid package Biden had just secured for Ukraine, Zelensky immediately launched into a spiel about all the additional things he needed and wasn't getting from the U.S.

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